About Calgary

Calgary is the best place to work, play, and share your life with people. As a born and raised Calgarian let me tell you: it is the best place to raise a family, build or start your business, and experience all that life has to offer.

Calgary has the most extensive urban pathway and bikeway network in North America: our city maintains an approximately 580 km of regional pathways, 220 km of local pathways, and 95 km of trails. Our communities are connected by parks, natural areas, and extensive multi-use pathways.

Calgary also boasts some of the best schools in the world. From elementary to post secondary, Calgary is host to amazing institutions that are investing in the next generation. Be at the University of Calgary, Mount Royal University, or our public school system, our educators and students are blazing a path forward together. Just this year the University of Calgary was ranked 2nd in Canada and 12th in North America for overall sustainability performance — and that’s just one of the ways that our institutions are leading the way in our city.

Industry

If you’re going places, Calgary is the place to be. Calgary is a connected city: 16 million consumers can be reached from Calgary by road in one day, and 3,855 cargo flights went through Calgary International Airport in 2016 in addition to 15.7 million passengers. It is home to Canadian Pacific and CN Rail – and on average rail transit from west coast ports is 48 hours.

Calgary is also responding to the world’s growing demand for affordable, renewable, and alternative energy. And we’re poised to play a leadership role. We’re serious about climate action – and all three levels of government are moving forward to addressing climate issues.

We’re also a crop above the rest. With $14.5 billion in sales in 2016, food manufacturing has overtaken refined petroleum as the largest manufacturing sector in Alberta. We send agricultural products — processed and primary — to over 150 countries all over the globe. And Alberta is home to some 15 centres, institutes, and teams that play a direct role in agricultural research and innovation.

And it’s not only the manufacturing and agriculture industries – we are also a creative hub. We have some 3,000 creative and film industries post-secondary graduates per year, have 259 film and television businesses calling Calgary home, and 10,200 Calgarians employed in the film and television sector. With almost 200 venues for live performing arts and over a 100 establishments for the display of the arts, Calgary is a proud sponsor and supporter of the cultural landscape of Canada.

Energy

Calgary is a world leader in the responsible production of energy – and Canada’s energy capital. Our industry has operated for more than a century, and is focused on environmentally and socially responsible development. We have the highest operating and safety standards, and Calgary is a global centre of excellence in thinking, technology, and transition to a lower carbon economy.

Canada’s is the world’s fifth-largest producer of natural gas and the sixth-largest producer of crude oil: and it’s in Calgary where we have the exceptional human resources to take these resources and bring them to market. Calgary has the highest concentration of engineers and geoscience professionals in Canada, and exceptional pool of workers with science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) backgrounds.

Head officers of every major company in the upstream, midstream, and downstream sectors of the industry in Canada are in Calgary — as are the energy services, engineering, financial, human resources, IT Services, and environmental firms. If there is a major energy company in Canada, more often than not, they’re in Calgary. We have the highest head office concentration per capita in Canada, and the second highest population growth rate over the past ten years of major cities in Canada.